St Maxime

Original owner Patience Tennent, the artist’s niece. First and second titles according to inscriptions. The second verso in Tennent’s hand recording information sent back to New Zealand with the painting. Third title, Overlooking Med Harbour, taken from the exhibition Flora Scales at The Suter Te Aratoi o Whakatū, Nelson, New Zealand, 2018.

Possibly painted in 1931 in the South of France. Flora Scales had some instruction from E.D. Kinzinger in St Tropez, France, Summer 1931. Scales could possibly have brought this painting with her from France to Christchurch, New Zealand, where she was located by June 1932. 

Another possibility is that Scales painted this work in the summer of 1933 after spending Winter in Munich from 14 October 1932 - 10 June 1933. Scales left London 29 September 1933 for New Zealand and could have brought the painting with her on this journey.

This is a close view of La Pesquière, the fishermen's landing stage on the eastern side of Plage de la Ponche, the fishing harbour of St Tropez, France. The landing stage is also seen in Untitled [Mediterranean Scene] 2 [BC017]. Scales is painting from above the landing stage looking across the gulf to Ste Maxime which is directly north and twenty-five minutes by ferry from La Pesquière. Scales explained her choice of a high viewpoint in order: “to grasp the subject in one moment - the moment of seeing it and then, step-by-step, you see more, more is revealed.”

Letter from Hélène Riboty, Archives communales de Saint-Tropez, France, to Gérard Dubosson, researcher, Nelson, New Zealand, 03.04.2020, “[This] seems to me painted from one end of the place du révelin, one sees la plage de la ponche (and la pesquière) which was the port of the fishermen of Saint-Tropez.”

While in St Tropez, France, Scales met New Zealand artists Frances Hodgkins and Gwen Knight [see Timeline 1931]. Flora Scales in conversation with M. de Lange, 1984, said that Gwen Knight had also painted this scene which she vividly remembered. Gwen Knight, Frances Hodgkins, Maude Burge and May Smith went to Ibiza at the end of 1932. Frances Hodgkins was there for six months, Gwen Knight stayed for six years. Scales recalled, “There were men with their nets spread out to dry on a huge concrete landing stage. It was always draughty. There was a little beach and tall houses and a clothesline with sailors' trousers and a vine with bright green leaves. I sat with my work on my lap and my bag was beside me – cats played around me, jumping into my bag.”

Scales described the delight of travelling south to St Tropez by train in the 1930s to Linda Gill, 27.08.1976, “...through the most wonderful landscape – the houses are pink and they rise straight out of the grapevines which are sometimes quite yellow.”

A few years earlier the English painter Vanessa Bell had also described the dramatic contrast between Northern Europe and the South of France, and the joy of living and working in the "Midi", in a letter to her sister, Virginia Woolf, 05.02.1927, “Painting is a different thing here from what it can be in the winter in England. It’s never dark even when the sky is grey. The light...is perfect and even now one could often work out of doors, if one wanted to. It makes such a difference to be sure one won’t be suddenly held up in the middle of something by fog or darkness. Also the beauty is a constant delight. The people are very friendly and helpful and living is very cheap...it seems more and more ridiculous for painters to spend half their lives in the dark.” – excerpt from Spalding, Frances, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist, Tauris Parke Paperbacks, London, England, 2016, pg 216